Update. IB week 6

Debating, 27th Sep

So. Unfortunately, I missed debating last week (20th) due to some timetable clash with a piano lesson. This Monday, though, we had another impromptu debate with the motion, "This House believes that it is irresponsible for women over the age of 50 to have children." Our team won by 8 points. One of the people at the debating club has an amusing tendency to argue, unintendedly, for the other side when he delivers his speech. On the other hand, I've finally had the wonderful opportunity to watch/listen to Tiffany Chung debate. After Paul Lau, Prakash Sanker, and Nicky Gordon left, she is, without a doubt, the most skillful debater we have. My own speech was... alright, I suppose. I'm coming to find the fast pace of thinking required for debating rather daunting on my meager mental capacity. I do hope, of course, that I adapt to it.

In the impromptu on the first day of the activity, I was Third Speaker for our team, the person who analyses all the points made throughout the debate before the Captain summarises. This Monday was the first time I spoke as Second Speaker. The role of a Second Speaker is drastically different from that of the Third Speaker, as the Second Speaker is expected to make new points while the Third Speaker should not. I find that it is much harder to present my own argument than it is to simply take down or back up arguments others have put out.

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Untitled Post

The student magazine project Victor, Emmanuel, Audrey, and I have been working on has now been tentatively titled the "Untitled Post", pending name change after the survey results come in. Meeting once a week, we've created a form for writer's to apply to write for the magazine, but our attempt at doing a survey during tutor period failed before it even started. We'd thought that House Assemblies had all been finished last week, so we emailed form tutors on Monday asking them to help us with the survey during pastoral on Tuesday. Guess what? Yeah. We got replies telling us that there were House Assemblies. And so, we intend to conduct our survey NEXT Tuesday instead.

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English Tutoring

I assisted at my second Year 11 extra English session today. Today. the students were doing corrections on the past-paper they had done in class previously. I just went around and helped out where I could. Ms Egan is starting to get worried that some of the students aren't taking these extra lessons seriously, since the actually _actual_, _real_ GCSE Eng Lit exam is coming up in November for them. It does seem to me, too, that some of the boys don't exactly want to be there and aren't ashamed of showing it. Well, what can one do about that?